I mostly agree with hapaboy, though I'm agnostic about the inevitability of further 9/11-like events, and I have no idea how long we should expect acts of terror to continue.
Since I'm sitting here waiting for the FOMC announcement, and there's nothing I want to trade, I'll blather on for a while on the subject.
The reason that the "war" in Iraq hasn't left us with a feeling of finality is that there was nothing final about it: When Bush declared the "end of major combat," he pointedly declined to claim that the "war" was over.
From another perspective, calling the conflict in Iraq a "war" is already to use a misnomer. Though referring to it as "Gulf War II" has become fashionable, and has a chance of sticking, I think it was more Gulf War "B" or maybe Gulf War 2.0 (though I certainly don't expect either term to catch on) - a major battle in a 13-year operation against Iraq that has itself been subsumed under a larger war with Islamic fascism - a war whose dimensions we didn't recognize until 9/11, and which has taken on the shape of another Post-Modern war akin to the Cold War. As hot points in the Cold War, Neither Korea nor Vietnam was fought independently of political and economic conflicts that were considered more important, and whether they even count as "wars" in their own right, at least from the US perspective, has been a subject of some academic debate. Many of the most important Cold War battles were not fought by conventional units, and, using a broad definition of terms, what was probably the most critical battle of the Cold War that did involve mass numbers of uniformed soldiers - over Europe - never involved direct clashes of arms on a large scale.
One reason I disagree so notoriously with so many of the war critics here on ET (and elsewhere, of course) is that I don't see the operations in Iraq in isolation. Depending on how events unfold, even defining the conflict as a global war with Islamic fascism may be turn out to be too narrow - the war with Islamic fascism can in turn be enfolded within even larger historical parameters. In any major conflict on such a scale, there will be mistakes, excesses, unnecessary losses, and even outright defeats and disasters. From such a perspective, quibbling about the accuracy of individual items of war propaganda or the precise timing of a given battle - or even the role of war propaganda in facilitating the the timing of a particular battle - seems rather insignificant to me.
The ambiguity about the Iraq conflict and about Post-Modern warfare altogether also creates much confusion, and makes gaining realistic perspectives on them very difficult. As has been pointed out elsewhere, we lost more soldiers in a few minutes on D-Day than in all of Gulf Wars 1.0 and 2.0 put together. On many, many days during World War II, ten to twenty times as many non-combatants were killed as appear to have been killed this year in Iraq - and not just as the result of major bombing raids, mass atrocities, or indirect effects. Conventional ground operations, especially urban combat, also took huge tolls on cvilian populaces. World War II was a particularly monstrous war, to say the least, but it wasn't unique in these respects by any means.
By these standards, the losses on 9/11, as horrific as they were, appear almost trivial if taken in isolation, but war isn't about tallying up losses and choosing the winner by highest score. 9/11 mattered most, in this context, for what it seemed to portend - including a possible future of multiple and worse 9/11's, and even the forced retreat of the US from its worldwide role. Another incident on that scale or larger would be very likely to have huge repercussions on our society, on our relations with other nations, and on how we go about prosecuting the war on terror. After a few 9/11 type events, we'd probably get numb to their horror, partly through the normal process of desensitization, but partly also because the casualties might be dwarfed by those mounting up worldwide in the larger war we might find ourselves prosecuting. I think it's also worth adding that even if we attempted to surrender (not that I think that's really in our character), that would be no guarantee, by far, of putting an end to such mass atrocities. I believe that any retreat of the United States from the world stage, at least before much stronger, more capable, and serious international institutions have been established, would open up the possibility of a 21st Century even bloodier than the 20th was.
One major goal of the war is to avoid such a turn of events. If we succeed, then no one will be able to determine with certainty what losses we avoided, and critics will be happy to complain about the inevitable flaws of even the most brilliantly executed operations - minor battles that seem larger for the lack of bigger ones to compare them against. A second goal would be, if the first goal fails, to settle the matter on terms favorable to our survival and future well-being while bringing about the end of hostilities as soon as practicable. Despite some appearances and panicky headlines, the battle in Iraq went very well in this context, serving both goals admirably, in my opinion, though probably not determinatively.
